Morsha

This week's blog post is the backstory of a character that a friend created for me for a tabletop RP game we play, as well as a character that's going to feature in a novel I'm planning on writing.


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Morsha had been alive for over three hundred years.

She was originally born a human. A Commoner, living in a small town. As a young adult, she had found a job as a servant in the house of the noble family that owned the land her town was on. They were not the nicest of people - the head of the family was a cruel man, his wife snide and unimpressed, and their daughter a spoiled brat. But a job was a job, and they’d paid well enough, despite their attitude, so she’d stuck with it.

Things changed when their daughter got sick, though. Morsha had been forced into being her personal maid, enduring her yelling and screaming and complaining, while the mother verbally abused her every day for “not making sure her daughter was comfortable and well taken care of,” and the father spend thousands of gold pieces trying to find out what was wrong with his daughter, and why she wasn’t getting any better.

In the end, it turned out to be a serious disease. One that had no known cure. The father had spent thousands more trying everything he could to cure his daughter, but nothing worked, and she slowly got sicker. In a last, desperate attempt, they found a Sorcerer who was willing to capture her soul upon death and put it into a new body, so she could continue living her life.

The family hired a Sculptor to create a new stone body for their daughter. He worked for months, slowly carving the new body to suit what the daughter wanted. It was not exactly the same; it was taller and prettier, possessing claws instead of fingernails, wings that she did not possess, with longer hair and wicked looking eyes.

The body would be stronger, able to withstand many attacks, and resistant to both sickness and death. Anyone who saw it knew that the body would be used for dark purposes by the daughter, once she inhabited it.

The Sorcerer had given the family a necklace, with a pendant that had a small, enchanted gem set into it. The gem was to act as a temporary container for the daughter’s soul when she died since it was likely that she would die before the body was finished.

However, Morsha was the one who ended up with it. The daughter deemed it ugly and refused to wear it, despite it’s purpose being clearly explained to her. Instead, she decided that her servant would be the one to wear it and that she would just have to stay by her side until she died so that her soul could be captured as intended.

But as death drew closer for the daughter, her parents forgot that Morsha was the one with the necklace. They banished her from their daughter’s chambers moments before she passed away, and did not even give her the chance to leave the necklace behind.

When they realised what they had done, they blamed Morsha for their daughter’s stubbornness, and their own foolishness. In his rage, the father murdered Morsha, forgetting that she was still wearing the necklace, and had her body disposed of. The mother took the necklace from Morsha’s corpse and placed it at their daughter’s side, hoping there might still be a chance for their daughter’s soul to inhabit the gem. Neither of them realised that, upon death, Morsha’s soul had been dragged into the gem.

When the body was complete, the mother and father took the necklace to the Sorcerer, convinced that the gem, which had begun to glow due to Morsha’s presence inside it, contained their daughter. As per their agreement, the Sorcerer transferred the soul into the body.

It was at that point that they’d realised their mistake. For where their daughter had been a fair-haired, green-eyed girl, Morsha had been a red-haired, amber-eyed girl, and as the body began to gain life, the colour of the hair and eyes began to change to match what Morsha had looked like.

As Morsha gained sense of her new body and moved stiff stone limbs to gain feeling in them, the mother and father had demanded that the Sorcerer remove the soul from the body immediately - for they would not have a servant wandering around in the likeness of their daughter. The Sorcerer, however, refused; once it has been done, the only way to fix it would be to destroy the body.

They wouldn’t do it. They couldn’t bring themselves to do it. Despite Morsha being the soul inside, the body still resembled their daughter. And while they were trying to figure out what could be done, Morsha had taken the opportunity to slip out and disappear.

It took her some time to adjust to her new body. Being in a body that was not skin and bone - being a Gargoyle - had its ups and downs; she’d had to learn each of them on her own, as she’d not dared remain nearby to learn from the Sorcerer.

Over the next thirty years, she spent most of it on the run. The Noble Family had hired many mercenaries to hunt her down, claiming she was a monster that had murdered their daughter in cold blood. Those she hadn’t been able to evade enough that they eventually gave up and went on to find jobs that would actually pay them, she was forced to kill, before they killed her.

When the mercenaries abruptly stopped coming, she dared wander home. She hadn’t seen any of her family in thirty years; she’d waited for the opportunity long enough.

Reaching home, she’d discovered a horrible and painful thing; after she’d disappeared, the Noble Family had had her entire family executed for Morsha’s “crimes”. That had included her infant sister, who’d only been six months old at the time. Enraged by their cruelty, Morsha made the journey to the Noble Family’s manor, intending on getting revenge for her murdered family.

Arriving at the manor, however, she learned that her previous employers had both passed away; the wife four years previously, and the head of the family only a few months before. With no heirs or relatives that could take over their estate, the manor had been practically abandoned. A butler who had worked for the family for many, many years was the only one who remained, tending to the empty house, the gardens, and the graves of the Noble Family all on his own.

Morsha spent the next hundred and fifty years or so on her own, for the most part. She inhabited the manor, ignoring the butler until he passed away in his sleep. She let everything overgrow, let the manor fall to ruin, and lived in only a couple of the rooms. Over time, she located where her previous body - by then only bones - had been dumped, and gave herself a proper burial in the town graveyard, alongside the rest of her family.

She only left the town for good when rumours of a monster began to spread, and brave adventurers and mercenaries appeared, seeking glory by killing the monster living in the old manor near the town.

In her subsequent wandering, she came across a place known as the Guild. Those that she met there did not bat an eye at the sight of her - with her grey-blue skin, bat-like wings, and claws - because there were others there that were, to be blunt, much more frightening than a Gargoyle.

So Morsha joined them, for even the smallest, frailest looking human was not afraid of her, as many of the villagers and townsfolk she had met, in all her years as a Gargoyle, had been. She would not claim that she had been happy; but she had been content, from the moment she’d stepped through the Guild’s double doors.